You gotta eat right, you gotta have healthy habits, you know, and balance out your decadence with a healthy lifestyle during the day.

If I focus on being an activist and my job is to be a rapper, I'm not going to be as good of a rapper. I need to focus on hip-hop and focus on making the music, so that when the activists come to me and they need my voice to create a platform, then I've got enough people listening to me. Not because I'm conscious, but because I'm dope.

I feel like I have way more resources, way more experience. I'm better. But my fans romanticize the earlier stuff, and I don't think it's just like a nostalgia thing of "He's not as good" - I think it's because that earlier stuff was aggressively marketed as a lifestyle to them.

If lyrics sold then truth be told/I'd probably be just as rich and famous as Jay-Z.

I tour whether I have album out or not. I tour more than any other hip-hop artist.

There are staples to my show. I have to be conscious about switching things up because I know people who saw me last year will say, 'He did that last time.' But if certain things work, they work.

Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art.